Scripting News

For example, on Christmas Eve I wrote about the Marx Brothers, and on Scripting News there's a link to a great biography site for four of the Marx Brothers.

DaveNet still reaches further than Scripting News, I think, but Scripting News has been growing steadily since its debut in April 1997.

It's a content flow

Scripting News is usually updated several times a day.

When I edit the page, it's an outline. I type in items, and render the page from the most recent seven outlines. The whole process is automatic, there's almost no hand-coding of HTML, and that's made it possible for me to create a new flow in a different format, XML.

One of the promises of XML is that it will make it possible to have different kinds of browsers, custom-built to present specialized content flows.

Scripting News is such a specialized flow, but one that's becoming more common. It's a news page, just like the home pages of all the big news websites.

So I decided to take the plunge, and take the chicken out of the chicken and egg problem. Or is it the egg? Who knows. But from now on, Scripting News, in addition to being a HTML web page, is also an XML application.

It's a nice way if you're nerdy to get a quick intro to what XML is about. And if you feel like really nerding out you could write a new kind of browser in Visual Basic or Java or Bongo or Filemaker or whatever. A great long weekend project. Let's have fun!